This is my attempt at a a Tau 'Null Deploy' army. The only problem is finding units that aren't too expensive but are tough enough to survive for two rounds of shooting. I've tried various Tau combination (units in/ behind buildings, optimized stealth cadre but none really worked and I've now joined the proverbial dark side and enlisted some Tzeentchian allies. The beauty of this is that they don't have to be very tough as the opponent will need to kill 11 models in (probably) 2+ cover in two different phases of the same game (as the blue horrors split), which should be near impossible.

So the plan is for the daemons to start in cover, maybe with the piranhas if a tabling looks possible.

Turn 2 the flamer suits come out from standard reserve within 6" of the short board edges, meaning that I can choose to have my outflanking Tetras come on any of 3 sides to be where they are needed most. The rest of the army, which would be deep striking, comes in within the homing beacon bubble of the tetras. The FB commander joins a drone squad and Shadowsun the plasma squad.

The main strength of this army is that it will be able to deliver phenomenally precise firepower, but after that it doesnt really put out as many shots as other lists so it will have to do as much damage as possible.

By the way my group doesn't go full competitive and min-max all our lists but we do try to make them decent.

Well obviously, but I'm asking what happens to his plan. He's investing more than a few points just to make sure that his Retaliation Cadre lands where he wants it. Has he considered how things might go if that fails?

That's true, and I really wish I could find the points for an Aegis defence line with comms, but I can't find anything I can really drop.But there's only a 1/9 chance that none of the positionnal relay suits will turn up (and even it's not absolutely catastrophic), and there's a 75% chance that at least 2 tetras arrive. Even 1 tetra exactly on point would let me position my crisis squads to take out one main target and the other units won't suffer (Riptide, broadside) as much by virtue of having longer ranged guns.Also in response to Panzer I am including a retaliation cadre. Did you mean a retaliation cadre paired with the infiltration cadre?